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La chanson d'Ève, Op 95

Introduction

‘Nothing equals the purity, the grandeur, the chastity of La chanson d’Ève, this Bonne chanson of the golden age’ (Vladimir Jankélévitch).

This substantial work by Charles Van Lerberghe appeared in 1904 and is dedicated to Émile Verhaeren. Fauré’s friend Alfred Mockel introduced the composer to this poetry which attracted him immediately. The work contains ninety-six poems and is divided into five sections: Fauré passes over the Prélude and begins his cycle with the first poem of Premières paroles (3), followed by 8, 7, 12, 16, 22 from the same section. (It is clear that the wonder of the Creation and the garden of Eden interest Fauré far more than Eve’s fall from grace.) There is a single poem from La tentation (39) before a return to Premières paroles (29). The eighteen poems of La faute are ignored entirely. The cycle ends with poems 86 and 94 (the third to last poem) from Crépuscule which the composer also adopts as the title of the penultimate song; thus Fauré’s cycle follows Van Lerberghe’s chronology only to a generalized extent; it skims the surface of the poet’s portrait of Eve while deepening it with matchless music. The opening lines of the poems are their only titles, thus Paradis, Prima verba and Eau vivante are Fauré’s own.

In motivic terms La chanson d’Ève is a less complex composition than La bonne chanson with its five recurring themes. In other ways, despite the fact that the music seems far less dense on the page, the later cycle is far more ambitious. Fauré, not yet as old as Haydn when he wrote Die Schöpfung, undertakes nothing less than a ‘Creation’ of his own. Eve is a cosmic figure, the grandest protagonist in any of the female song cycles; and we hear the voice of God Himself, a unique event in the song repertoire. So absorbing is this picture that the absence of Adam (from Fauré’s scenario at least) seems hardly worthy of comment.

Recordings

'This varied and generous selection of 28 songs is perhaps the best general introduction to this important side of Fauré's output and is also one of G ...'Deeply considered and deeply moving performances' (BBC Record Review)» More

'There are songs of a fragrance, ambiguity and vision unique to Fauré and all the singers involved in this glorious project, while not always in their ...'This completes Hyperion's recording of all Fauré's songs master-minded by Graham Johnson with a quintet of specialist singers: Jennifer Smith, Felici ...» More

It is the first morning of creation.
Like an abashed flower breathed on the night air,
With the pristine whisperings that rise from the waves,
A blue garden blooms.

Everything is still blurred and indistinct,
Trembling leaves, singing birds,
Gliding wings,
Springs that rise, voices of air and water,
An immense murmuring;
Which yet is silence.

Opening to the light her soft and vacant eyes,
Young, heaven-born Eve
Is awakened by God.

And the world lies at her feet like a lovely dream.

Now God says to her: Go, daughter of man,
And bestow on all beings
That I have created a word from your lips,
A sound that we might know them by.

And Eve went, obedient to her Lord,
Into her rose grove,
Bestowing on all things
A word, a sound from her flower-like lips:

On all that runs, that breathes, that flies …

Day meanwhile passes, and hazy, as at dawn,
Eden sinks slowly to sleep
In the twilight and steals away
In the silence of a blue dream.

The voice is hushed, but everything still hearkens,
Waiting in expectation;
When with the rising of the evening star,
Eve sings.

Charles Van Lerberghe (1861-1907)English: Richard Stokes

8 September 1906, the second song in the cycle to be composed, E minor/E major (original key) 3/2 Andante molto moderato

At ten pages, this is by far the longest song of the cycle. It opens with a succession of bare semibreves that flower into etiolated chords; these six bars of accompaniment might be labelled the ‘Eden’ motif A; even by their appearance on the page (as in Wolf’s Grenzen der Menschheit) these open notes depict the vast expanses of space over which hovers the hand of God. This music for the dawning of life itself had first been heard in Mélisande’s song and later reappears in Crépuscule (actually the first song in the cycle to be composed). At the end of the poem’s first verse, following ‘Un jardin bleu s’épanouit’, another theme B is first heard (in bars 21 to 23) in a piano interlude that coincides with a change of key signature into E major. This pattern of intervals descends the stave while doubling back on itself – a simple succession of minims (concealed, as if in a garden, within a foliage of surrounding crotchets): D sharp falls to C sharp, then a semitone rise to D natural, a drop of a minor third to B natural and then back up to C sharp. This is the motif of Eve herself – ‘la demoiselle élue’. From this seed the composer brings paradise to life: crotchet triplets enrich the 3/2 texture as if with a profusion of tropical vegetation, flowing rivers and teeming animals. There is nothing like this ‘murmure immense’ in all song, a magical, deliberately blurred hum that is nevertheless as silent as a spinning top (the diminuendo and thinning of texture at the end of the second strophe remind us of this). This is followed by a return to theme A for the awakening of Eve, and then the heightened reappearance of music derived from B where the ecstatic grandeur of the picture threatens to break the boundaries of the musical possibilities of voice and piano. This magnificent passage gives way to the voice of God Himself – all-powerful, yet hushed in His understated reasonableness. The world is now ready for the naming of flowers, birds and animals. There are no more overgrown triplets, only music that shows Eve as newly appointed mistress of her domain; the momentary quickening into life at ‘Chose qui fuit … souffle … vole’ is the very act of creation magically turned into music. The world’s first day passes and theme A paints the twilight (verse 6) in the same terms as dawn, now in a lower, darker tessitura. The final strophe is a drawing together of musical threads: theme A climbs in the pianist’s left hand, quietly flowing quavers ripple in the right; with the words ‘Ève chante’ theme B returns for a postlude of seraphic calm – Eden has been created and ordered by God and is now in the care of its Earth Mother. The composer omits the poet’s last strophe to forge a stronger link with the following text.

It is the first morning of creation.
Like a misty flower breathed upon the night air,
with the new-born whisper arising from the waves,
a blue garden blossoms.

Everything is still blurred and hazy.
There is a rustle of leaves, a singing of birds,
a whirring of wings,
a murmur of streams. The voices of the air,
the voices of the waters:
an immense yet soundless murmur.

Opening her soft, puzzled eyes to the brightness,
The young and divine Eve
Awakens from God;
And the world spreads out at her feet like a beautiful dream.

Now, God says to her: ‘Go, daughter of man,
and bestow a word from your lips
on all things that I have created,
a sound for them to be known by.’

And Eve went out, obedient to her Lord,
into her rose grove,
bestowing on each rose
a sound from her rosebud lips,

Evanescent, whispering, fleeting …

Meanwhile, day passes and, hazy as at the dawn,
Eden sinks gradually
into sleep in the twilight,
wrapping itself in the silence of a blue dream.

The voice is silent,
but every thing still hearkens to it.
Everything remains attentive as, at the rising of the evening star,
Eve sings.

How it sings
In my voice,
The constantly murmuring soul
Of the springs and woods!

Clear air of paradise
With your ruby grape-clusters,
With your sheafs of light,
With your roses and your fruits;

How we marvel at such a moment!
Words that had slumbered for aeons
Finally come to life on my lips
As sounds, as flowers.

Since my breath uttered their song,
Since my voice created them,
What deep and blissful silence
Is born from their unburdened souls!

Charles Van Lerberghe (1861-1907)English: Richard Stokes

28 September 1906, the third song in the cycle to be composed, G flat major (original key) 4/4 Adagio molto

In this G flat major meditation Eve herself speaks for the first time. The images of ruby-coloured grapes, roses and fruits, and Fauré’s response to them in music that recalls Le parfum impérissable, locate Eden in the hot-house abundance of the Middle East in the composer’s mind. This earlier song has prepared us for a simple crotchet chord accompaniment that shadows the vocal line with anything but simple harmonies. Once again the first bar presents an empty vista on which will soon be imposed every manner of subtle and recherché twist and turn, a dense forest of accidentals created with the greatest deliberation. In the piano’s left hand, after ‘Depuis que ma voix les a créées’ there is a veiled reference to theme B – the G flat pedal through this section signifying stability – the ‘silence heureux et profond’ of ordered creation. The sudden presence of a C natural in the penultimate bar (an echo of ‘allégées’) is like balm to the burdened soul, a reminder of primal innocence.

Fiery roses
In the motionless night,
It is in you that I sing
And have my being.

It is in you, gleaming stars
High in the forests,
That I am eternal
And given sight.

O deep sea,
It is in you that my blood
Is reborn, white wave
And dancing tide.

And it is in you, supreme force,
Radiant sun,
That my very soul
Reaches its god!

Charles Van Lerberghe (1861-1907)English: Richard Stokes

June 1908, the fourth song in the cycle to be composed, E major (original key) 3/4 Andante

Roses are everywhere in this cycle: in this song where they are red, in the eighth song where they are white, and in the ‘roses chaudes’ of the seventh song. In the first strophe Eve identifies herself with this flower, the initial impetus behind her gently palpitating hymn of rapture, passionate but always ‘pudique’. When the stars are included in Eve’s litany, mezzo staccato quavers seem admirably suitable for pinpricks of light. The deepest bass note, and a forte dynamic, are reserved for sea imagery (in this music for ‘flot dansant’ we can hear the beginnings of Je me suis embarqué from L’horizon chimérique). The song’s climactic final strophe aspires to the sun, the climbing vocal line widening in distance from the falling bass to encompass the majesty of this solar ‘force suprême’.

How radiant is God today,
How he exults and blossoms
Among these roses and fruits!

How he murmurs in this fountain!
Ah! how he sings in these birds …
How sweet is his breath
In the new fragrant spring!

How he bathes in light
With love, my young god!
All earthly things
Are his dazzling raiments.

Charles Van Lerberghe (1861-1907)English: Richard Stokes

1909, the sixth song in the cycle to be composed, C minor/C major (original key) 4/4 Quasi adagio

For a poem that expresses the pantheistic concept of God as all-in-all, the composer’s genius for reductive concision seems heaven-sent. For the first two strophes the pared-down piano-writing, suggestive of an almost Bach-like rigour, could easily be transcribed for string quartet. The poem ascribes nature’s flowering to one divine source; to mirror this, the accompaniment for the first strophe germinates solely from theme A, restated in each of the opening four bars. In the second verse theme B is concealed (in diminution) in the undulating quavers in the tenor (or viola) line in the piano’s four-part texture. The third verse expands into a glorious peroration: the accompaniment, now grandiose, quickens into semiquavers while theme B resounds like a bell in octaves in the treble stave. This peroration leads to the remarkable change of colour from C minor to the C major of the closing bars where Eden seems bathed in heavenly light.

And my soul, like a rose
That is trembling and listless all day,
Awakens to the beauty of things,
As my heart awakens to their love.

Charles Van Lerberghe (1861-1907)English: Richard Stokes

June 1908, the fifth song in the cycle to be composed, D flat major (original key) 3/4 Andante

On the page this piece can be overlooked as unexceptional – an unchanging accompanying pattern, a left-hand crotchet followed by three right-hand semiquavers, and a rather undemonstrative vocal line that moves in small steps. But this would be to reckon without Fauré’s harmonic (and enharmonic) genius that is demonstrated here in rich measure. This is the music of awakening, not only of the new world, but of Eve’s awareness in the sun’s warmth. In the first verse, at ‘le soleil luit’, we hear a sybaritic gear-change that Debussy would not disown but, for the most part in this music for the listening soul, Fauré moves from chord to chord in a way that is his alone. Without making us aware of it, he traverses huge distances in incremental steps that defy ordinary analysis (Jankélévitch refers to ‘mille nuances différentes’). Having radiantly returned us to the home key on the word ‘amour’, the composer omits the poem’s last verse.

How simple and clear you are,
Spring water,
Who, from the heart of the earth,
Surges into these pools and sings!

O divine, pure fountain,
The plants breathe in
Your liquid limpidity;
The doe and the dove quench in you their thirst.

And you descend by the gentle banks
Of flowers and moss
Towards the primeval ocean,
You who come and go, without cease or fatigue,
From the land to the sea and from the sea to the sky.

Charles Van Lerberghe (1861-1907)English: Richard Stokes

1909, the seventh song in the cycle to be composed, C major (original key) 3/4 Allegretto moderato

Fauré’s water music is usually associated with gently flowing rivers, or the rocking of the ocean waves in various moods. This is a natural spring, self-replenishing, from deep within the earth; there are no glittering cascades in the treble clef. A moto perpetuo of semiquavers in the middle of the accompaniment’s texture – like a dovetailing between viola and second violin – flows with the quiet persistence of a burst water-main, and as difficult for the pianist’s hands to find and contain. The ancients said that one could not step into the same river twice: restless harmonic metamorphoses reflect a ceaseless, ever-changing flow. Van Lerberghe’s line concerning water’s journey from land to sea, and from sea to sky, echoes Goethe’s Gesang der Geister über den Wassern. In the song’s final page (particularly in the two-bar interlude after ‘sans cesse, et jamais lasse’) the music seems to be fighting for air as chromatic manoeuvrings rise in ascending sequences. As in L’aube blanche, resolution is only to be found in the closing bars: the water has journeyed from the subterranean depths and finds it way to the ocean and thence to the broad expanses of the sky – a rediscovery of C major that sounds like the birth of a new tonality. Having arrived at such a remarkable cadence, Fauré ignores the last verse of Van Lerberghe’s poem. Jankélévitch thought that the poem’s first verse, as printed above, summed up the entire nature of Fauré’s creative gift.

How artless and clear you are,
living water that springs,
singing, into pools
from the bosom of the earth.

O divine, pure spring,
the plants breathe in
your liquid brightness.
The doe and the dove quench their thirst in your water.

And you wend your way down the gentle banks
of flowers and mosses
towards the eternal ocean.
You that come and go without ceasing, never tiring,
from the land to the sea and from the sea to the heavens …

Are you awake, my fragrant sun,
My scent of bright-coloured bees,
Do you drift across the world,
My sweet aroma of honey?

At night, while my steps
Prowl in the silence,
Do you, who scent my lilacs
And vivid roses, proclaim me?

Am I like a bunch of fruit
Hidden in the foliage,
That nothing reveals
But whose fragrance is felt at night?

Does he know at this hour
That I am loosening my tresses
And that they are breathing;
Does he sense it on earth?

Does he sense that I reach out my arms,
And that my voice – which he cannot hear –
Is fragrant
With lilies from my valleys?

Charles Van Lerberghe (1861-1907)English: Richard Stokes

January 1910, the ninth song in the cycle to be composed, D major (original key) 2/4 Allegretto con moto

Among the many animal and insect poems in the French song repertoire (Chabrier, Poulenc) this song is overlooked as the most perfect bee song ever written. In the piano’s unceasing sextuplet tremolos, implacable in their rhythmical exactitude, an apian hum (inspired admittedly by only a passing image in the poem) bristles with intoxicating energy. Of course this glinting dynamo of an accompaniment serves more than one illustrative purpose – we are also aware of the radiation of the sun, a primal force in nature which Eve addresses excitedly, as she might a lover. The song depicts the burgeoning of her sexuality; it is the only text that comes from La tentation, and it follows her first encounter with Adam (who is never named as such). The music is prophetic of the first song in the L’horizon chimérique cycle, La mer est infinie (in the same key of D major), which defines the movement of the ocean in a similar kind of moto perpetuo. In this song sunlight, like water, is uncontainable: with Fauré’s help it searches out and pervades every nook and cranny of harmonic possibility.

Amid the scent of white roses
She sits and dreams;
And the shade is fair, as if an angel were mirrored there.

Darkness falls, the grove sleeps;
Among the leaves and branches,
A golden paradise opens out over the blue.

A voice which sang but now, now murmurs.
A murmur is breathed, and dies away.

In the silence petals fall …

Charles Van Lerberghe (1861-1907)English: Richard Stokes

1909, the eighth song in the cycle to be composed, E minor (original key) 3/4 Andantino.

The harmonic complexities of this song are manifold with scarcely a nod towards the home key until the coda. This is because the chromatic theme B, not heard since Comme Dieu rayonne, returns as a bass line, a kind of passacaglia in quietly sonorous crotchets. A concealed melody in the thumb of the pianist’s right hand also traces the same theme with gentle insistence as the treble stave answers the bass. After the poem’s first strophe even the vocal line (at ‘L’ombre descend’ and ‘le bosquet dort’) is fashioned from theme B. The superimposition of these three strands creates another ‘murmure immense’ indicative of a blurred dream where a ‘paradis d’or’ will open out of the blue. With this search for an image of golden light in the second and third strophes the striving of the restless bass line recalls ‘Vite, vite, / Car voici le soleil d’or’ (Avant que tu ne t’en ailles from La bonne chanson). The relative calm of the song’s final page is the kind of envoi we have come to expect in this cycle – the berceuse of the last three bars reveals Eve, madonna-like, meditating in a gentle shower of rose petals. The closing chord of G major, with a D at the top, already contains the opening note of Crépuscule.

This evening, amid the happiness,
Who is it that sighs and what is it that weeps?
What comes to flutter in my heart,
Like a wounded bird?

Is it a premonition,
A voice from the past?
I listen, till it hurts,
To that sound in the silence.

Isle of oblivion, O paradise!
What cry in the night cracks
Your voice that cradles me?

What cry pierces
Your girdle of flowers,
And your lovely veil of happiness?

Charles Van Lerberghe (1861-1907)English: Richard Stokes

4 June 1906, the first song in the cycle to be composed, D minor/D major (original key) 3/2 Adagio non troppo.

This is where Fauré first began work on his cycle, with a recapitulation of the music for Mélisande and in the same key. Perhaps the imagery of the ‘oiseau blessé’ reminded the composer of the mysterious character in Maeterlinck’s play, or perhaps it is that both songs predict the deaths of their respective heroines. Eve is rendered mortal and she must die; darkness falls as a result of her tasting the serpent’s apple, but this is an aspect of the story that Fauré prefers to pass over. The musical material is theme A of course, although one fancies that one already hears theme B in the pianist’s left hand in bar 29 as the sparse accompaniment gradually fills out with thirds, sixths and ninths and becomes a thing of power and grandeur. Eve’s final question remains unanswered in the void of the infinite, but Fauré’s music, particularly in the last-minute change into the major key, envisages a kind of transfiguration. Some months later he went on to compose Paradis, another song of the half-light – the dawn of the world rather than Eden’s twilight – where theme A is fashioned in E minor, rather than D minor.

Come, gentle wave that shines
In the darkness:
Bear me off into your void!

Come, dark sigh in which I tremble,
Like a wind-intoxicated flame!

It is in you that I wish to be absorbed,
To be extinguished and dissolved,
Death, to which my soul aspires!

Come, break me like a flower of foam,
A speck of sun in the crest
Of the waves,

And like a golden amphora’s
Flaming wine of heavenly fragrance,
Pour my soul
Into your abyss, that it might perfume
The dark earth and the breath of the dead.

Charles Van Lerberghe (1861-1907)English: Richard Stokes

January 1910, the last song in the cycle to be composed, D flat major (original key) 4/4 Andante molto moderato.

This type of crotchet-accompanied vocal line, going nowhere and yet everywhere, is a familiar trademark of the late Fauré. The song’s final strophe reintroduces theme B with a gradual, stately descent in both piano staves, a mingling of harmonies and rhythms that makes a haunting effect entirely consonant with that of fading away, a kind of musical vaporization (cf Inscription sur le sable which closes Le jardin clos). The reader of Van Lerberghe’s entire Chanson will have followed a longer and more complex chronicle of Eve’s life, her passionate attraction to Adam, and so on. But any religious aspect fails to engage the composer. God appears in the first song, but in the last song Fauré omits the lines that refer to Him; the consolatory angel of the following poem is given no musical voice. Fauré’s Eve is beyond religion, a symbol of pantheism and womanhood; her death, as natural as that of flowers and trees, is described without the slightest suggestion of salvation. Like everything else in this cycle the cosmic grandeur of her dissolution into the ether is implacable. In this music of the spheres we see can glimpse both the composer’s sense of wonder, and his unsentimental grasp of reality – especially in relation to his own old age.

Come, gentle wave that shines
in the darkness;
carry me off into your oblivion.

Come, dark sigh in which I tremble
like a flame intoxicated by the wind!

In you, Death,
to whom my soul aspires,
I desire to be extinquished and dissolve.
[Mighty God whom it awaits
With love’s songs and laughter.]

Come, break me like a flower of foam,
a speck of sunlight in the crest
of the waves.
[Whose petals the night plucks, which the
darkness obliterates, and which blossoms in space.]
And like a wine with a divine aroma
and a divine flame from a golden jar,
pour my soul
Into your abyss so that it perfumes
the dark earth and the breathing of the dead.